listen 60

Barbie Exposure May Limit Girls' Career Imagination
The ubiquitous Barbie doll: she's been everything from a football coach to a surgeon.

But girls who play with Barbie may have their ambition stunted.

That's according to a study in the journal Sex Roles.

Researchers had groups of girls play with one of three dolls.

One was a Barbie doll dressed as a fashion model in a clingy dress.

A second Barbie was a doctor in a white coat and jeans.

The third doll was a Mrs. Potato Head.

After a few minutes of play the girls were asked if they could someday be any of eleven different occupations.

The girls who'd played with either of the Barbie dolls were more likely to pick traditional pink-collar jobs like teacher, librarian or flight attendant.

But girls who played with Mrs. Potato Head envisioned themselves as also being firefighters, pilots or police officers.

The researchers say the limited occupational opportunity that Barbie seems to impart could be due to her unrealistic and overly sexualized image, rather than her outfits or careers.

And the world is less limited when looked at through Mrs. Potato Head's eyes.

Movie-Watching Together Strengthens Marriages

Keeping a marriage together takes effort, and care.

And maybe even watching classic romance movies, like The Way We Were or Husbands And Wives.

And this is because of the conversations such movies can start.

That's the finding from a study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology.

Psychologists found that encouraging couples to watch romance flicks and then discuss them cut the divorce rate in half.

The researchers divided 174 newlywed couples into three programs:

active listening, where one spouse listens and then paraphrases back what they heard;

or compassion training, doing random acts of kindness for your partner...

or watching a movie a week for a month.

The movie-viewing couples discussed each film after watching it, guided by questions about the characters.

Questions like: Were they able to open up and tell each other how they really felt?

Or did they tend to just snap at each other with anger?

All three programs worked very well, dropping the divorce rate after three years to 11 percent, versus 24 percent for couples who did no therapy.

But the movie program is much more accessible and cheaper than counseling.

The researchers note that the magic is not really in the movies, but rather the time that couples take to think about behavior.

But hey, maybe sitting together in the dark helped too.